Stage One (Fight-or-flight response): "Maybe G.o.d sees the fall of a sparrow, but you couldn"t tell it by me. If I didn"t do my part to fit in, I would be alone and forgotten. The cherished feelings I have for my family are what holds my life together, because these few people care that I exist. Events are random, treacherous things that can happen at any moment. I never forget that. After I die, I will just be a memory, or if I am lucky I will then find out if G.o.d knows who I am. My faith tells me that he does."
Stage Two (Reactive response): "Everything comes with a price. If you waste your time and energy, life doesn"t give you much back. But since I know how to organize my life, I can bring life"s rewards my way.
Everything I do has a point; my driving ambition is to make each moment count. When the time comes to rest, I will look around with satisfaction at what I"ve made of myself. I don"t have time to think about what comes next, but in scary moments I wonder if G.o.d will get me for the bad things I had to do."
Stage Three (Restful awareness response): "I wonder if things are as random as they appear. I"ve seen evil rewarded and good punished. Yet at other times an underlying purpose seems to raise its head. I need to think about all this because the answers I get from society are too confused and conflicted. It just may be true that someone up there knows everything; I feel it in my bones."
Stage Four (Intuitive response): "I could swear that someone is reading my mind. If I think of something, it seems to happen, or at least there are a lot of unexplained coincidences. I"ve learned to go with these signals, wherever they come from. I am the master of my own choices. Sometimes I make mistakes, but even those I can witness with calm acceptance."
Stage Five (Creative response): "Things work out because they are meant to. Otherwise the world would be a churning cauldron, and it isn"t.
Everywhere I look I see patterns and symbols; there is incredible beauty and order. There are times when this complexity intoxicates me. I just can"t believe so much potential exists-I have the heart of an artist but the soul of a wizard. Who knows what kind of power I will one day wield."
Stage Six (Visionary response): "The world has a heart, and that heart is love. In the midst of all struggle, I see that G.o.d is watching. He doesn"t interfere, but he doesn"t lose track, either. He brings a solution to fit every problem, a reaction that suits every action. How he does this is a mystery, but nothing is more real. There is grace in the fall of a leaf.
Our deeds are weighed in the balance by a loving Creator who never judges or punishes."
Stage Seven (Sacred response): "Action and reaction are one, and always have been. As events spin from the web of time, I see no difference between the action and the one who performs it. The ego used to believe that there was an "I" who had to oversee and control. This "I" is only an illusion. No action could ever be lost or overlooked in the fabric of unity."
These viewpoints look very different on the surface, yet the same principle is being unfolded in a rising arc. In other words, a secret spiritual path underlies the apparent randomness of everyday existence.
"All of reality is a symbol for spirit," the Sufis say. Or, to recall Rumi"s beautiful phrase, "I come from Elsewhere, and though I do not know where that is, I am certain to return there in the end." Only in stage six does the saint realize that his soul"s unfolding was always taking place.
Until clarity dawns, a certain amount of confusion is always present.
Everyone receives the same signals from G.o.d. The impulse to behave in the highest spiritual way comes to us from beyond our five senses. We refuse to believe that we are connected. But in truth when love is called for, each person tries to display perfect love; when compa.s.sion is called for, each person tries to display perfect compa.s.sion. This holds for the criminal, the saint, the businessman, the dictator, the factory worker.
The message is pure; the filter is impure.
The saint sees that we are all hooked into the same level of infinite intelligence, creativity, and love. G.o.d and your soul are in perfect communication. The message breaks down for reasons we have been detailing at length: ego needs, distortions of perception, lack of self-worth, and all kinds of traumas and wounds that defeat our best intentions. If lumped together, these impurities are called avidya in the Indian tradition, a Sanskrit word that breaks down into two components, the root word for "not" and the root word for "knowing." By not knowing who we are, by not knowing what G.o.d is, by not knowing how to connect with the soul, we fall into sin and ignorance. In everyday usage, avidya is sometimes called both sin and ignorance, but these pejorative terms hide the essence of the truth, which is that all such obstacles exist in consciousness and can be cleared away.
What"s the one thing you can do today to grow in spirit? Stop defining yourself. Don"t accept any thought that begins "I am this or that." You are not this or that. You are beyond definition, and therefore any attempt to say "I am X" is wrong. You are in pa.s.sage. You are in the process of redefining yourself every day. Aid that process, and you cannot help but leap forward on the path.
If you take a clear look at yourself, you will find that your mind is more like a swarm of bees than like an arrow shooting straight for the goal. A swarm of bees can travel from point A to point B, just like an arrow, but it does so in a vague, swirling, fuzzy way. Thus we hold in our minds all kinds of shifting att.i.tudes, many of which contradict each other. Our love is bound up with hatred, our trust with suspicion, our altruism with selfishness. Because this is so, the only clear path to G.o.d is a path of constant self-awareness. You must see through your own mask if you want to take it off.
Avidya is hard to pierce. It takes a lot of attention to look in the mirror, because our masks do not stop looking back at us. But if you take any issue facing you, your present att.i.tudes will be a clue to your deeper beliefs, and belief is where the real change must occur. A belief lies close to the soul. It is like a microchip that keeps sending out the same signal over and over, making the same interpretation of reality until you are ready to pull out the old chip and install a new one. The following pages explore this in greater detail.
MASKING THE SOUL.
Our att.i.tudes hide deeper spiritual beliefs, and when we see through them, beliefs can be changed.
Mask: atheist, cynic, or failed seeker Att.i.tude: Doubt, resistance, ironical detachment, in the habit of mistrust. Fall-back emotion (*) is anxiety.
Belief: G.o.d cannot be proved; if he exists he has no power over the material world; I am alone, my fear of emptiness is my chief reason to keep seeking.
Mask: leader, achiever, or skeptic Att.i.tude: Certainty, confidence, self-reliance, in the habit of demanding rational explanations. Fall-back emotion is anger or obstinacy.
Belief: I am in control of my life, not G.o.d; if he demands surrender I will ignore him; secretly I believe that my own power is greater than his.
Mask: thinker or dreamer Att.i.tude: Reflective, conciliatory, calm, in the habit of a.s.sessing situations emotionally. Fall-back emotion is depression or resignation.
Belief: G.o.d hints at his presence inside me; I will get the message once I stop falling into confusion; G.o.d favors inward-looking action more than outward action.
Mask: idealist or liberator Att.i.tude: Self-aware, nonjudgmental, willing to be an iconoclast or to defy normal expectations. Fall-back emotion is detachment.
Belief: G.o.d doesn"t think I am wrong or sinful; I can only accept him to the degree I accept myself; forgiveness is real.
Mask: artist, adventurer, or explorer Att.i.tude: Playful, emotionally resilient, eager to try anything new, tendency to be highly sensitive. Fall-back emotion is fantasy (self-absorption).
Belief: G.o.d has made a recreational universe; I am safe following my creative impulses; I am approved of by G.o.d.
Mask: prophet or redeemer Att.i.tude: Humble, deeply forgiving and accepting of others, awed by mystery, able to see to the depth of any person or situation. Fall-back emotion is love.
Belief: There are no miracles until you see that all of life is a miracle; G.o.d works through me, my greatest joy is service to him.
Mask: no mask Att.i.tude: Immersion in bliss, wisdom, and peace, with no personal att.i.tudes-the viewpoint is universal. Fall-back emotion is compa.s.sion.
Belief: No personal beliefs; every action and word comes directly from the divine source; a certainty that being human is a blessed state.
The above serves to show how pervasively we are influenced by our state of awareness. Every emotion or att.i.tude has a spiritual meaning, despite the fact that society doesn"t acknowledge this. In society"s eyes, events become spiritual only in church or during times of crisis and transition.
But the soul journey is a constant in everyone"s life. Your typical att.i.tudes, along with the emotions you cannot shake, indicate in a subtle way that spiritual issues are churning at a deeper level. Even the saint and the redeemer are wearing a mask, however thin, that doesn"t yet let them see the totality of the self. A set of att.i.tudes may fit you so well that you apply them almost all the time. This is the mark of someone who moves very slowly on the path, such as the confirmed skeptic who remains doubtful about all spiritual issues, from the existence of G.o.d to the possibility of an afterlife. People who cling firmly to skepticism are likely to deny that they have any fear of emptiness and abandonment, yet ultimately they have more of these issues than anyone else-the mask is just highly deceptive.
In the same vein, highly successful people who owe their achievements to struggle and compet.i.tiveness tend to wear the mask of self-confidence and not to look at the hidden beliefs that would put them in defiance of G.o.d.
Even if they "believe in" G.o.d, they act on personal power, and if seriously confronted with the possibility of surrender, they reject it outright. Between will and surrender, there is no choice for them.
What is the mark of someone who moves very quickly on the path? It may seem to be a paradox, but the more turbulent you are inside, the faster you are moving. Ferment is good. Not buying into your own story is good.
Krishnamurti used to say that discontent was the flame of the seeker.
Meher Baba, an Indian master aligned with Sufism, taught that the only prerequisite for waking up was total disillusionment. Why? Because the whole notion that you are a fixed ent.i.ty is a great illusion, and the sooner you see how varied and complex you are, the sooner you will drop the masks of your ego.
There is no standing still in nature; creatures either move forward or die. Seeing how a flower blooms, goes to seed, and sacrifices itself to bring new life, we wonder if our souls fall into the same cycle. Do we rise and fall, going through an endless round of birth and death? Or is there a tendency to keep moving closer to G.o.d, despite the many obstacles and setbacks that befall us along the way? Speaking personally, this is an important question for my behavior today, since I can choose to obey my ego drives or my higher ideals. Ninety-nine percent of humanity has a story they believe in, and nothing shakes them from their story. Saints remind us to choose the ideal over the egotistical, and when being selfish, greedy, and ambitious is just too tempting, the saints don"t condemn us. "Come to me," Rumi implores, "even if you have broken your vows a thousand times." The soul can"t be hindered by outward action. No one makes the soul journey faster or slower than anyone else. Time doesn"t count at the level of the soul. What counts is perception. When you perceive that awakening is inevitable, the magnetic pull of the soul will keep changing you.
You and I are nothing but saints in the making. We can exhibit whatever behavior we want, but life flows upward from the roots, not downward from the branches. On a spiritual basis, being good is never wrong. But in terms of sheer effectiveness-which means trying to wake up with the fewest delays, obstacles, and backsliding-adopting the right belief is much more powerful. As the first principle says, evolution cannot be stopped. With this belief in mind, you have a basis for forgiving any wrongdoing, letting go of the past, and giving yourself a second chance at anything where you failed the first time around. There is no fall from grace, only a very long furlough. In the end there is only one reliable guide: Find your place on the rising arc and keep moving.
* A fall-back emotion is a coping response. It arises when you cannot resolve inner tension or a crisis. It also reflects a sense of connection or separation from G.o.d.
SPIRITUAL AWAKENING.
If asked what separates a spiritual person from a skeptic, I would not say that the answer is belief in G.o.d. It is clarity. Millions of believers still strive to be "saved," whether they are Christians, Muslims, or of any other faith. They actively seek a clear perception of G.o.d that will affect them personally. When does this become possible? Do we have to wait for stage six, the stage of the saint, or any particular stage at all?
Stripped of religious coloration, being saved is the same as awakening in consciousness, a perceptual leap that makes G.o.d real instead of doubtful.
Here is a striking example.
A young man in his twenties named Bede Griffiths had been going through a period of deep doubt and depression. Being religious, he sought solace in a church, where he prayed without success. One day during service he heard the line "Open my eyes that I may see the wondrous things of Thy law" from the 113th Psalm. Deeply moved, the young man felt his melancholy lift away, and he had the overwhelming sense that his prayers had been answered by divine intervention. He walked outside onto the London streets, and later described the experience in the following words: When I went outside, I found that the world about me no longer oppressed me as it had done. The hard casing of exterior reality seemed to have been broken through, and everything disclosed its inner being. The buses in the streets seemed to have lost their solidity and were glowing with light. I hardly felt the ground as I trod ... I was like a bird that has broken the sh.e.l.l of its egg and finds itself in a new world; like a child that has forced its way out of the womb and sees the light of day for the first time. (1) Time and again in such awakenings there is an insistence that outer things have dramatically changed, whereas to other observers they haven"t. But this doesn"t mean that going into the light, seeing the face of G.o.d, or whatever other name we wish to give to the experience is false. The observer isn"t separate from outer reality. The photons firing in the brain are exactly the same as photons organized into "real" objects. So inner and outer vision are not separate. The mystical branch of Islam known as Sufism declares that all light, inner and outer, is but one light. This is something people find hard to accept, because the duality of inner versus outer, real versus unreal, objective versus subjective has been drilled into us since birth. To get past this dualism, we have to return to our three levels of existence: When light is visible and organized into concrete objects, reality is material.
When light contains feeling, thought, and intelligence, reality is quantum.
When light is completely unmanifest, with no qualities anyone can measure, reality is virtual.
In place of the old dualism that insists upon keeping our inner and outer life apart, we can restore the light to its wholeness. One can think of a photon as the archetype of all energy that is blossoming out from nothing and nowhere to something and somewhere: the bridge for mystical awakenings is light as it moves from virtual to material existence.
In this scheme one traditional belief gets reversed. The virtual domain, unlike heaven, is our source rather than our destination after death. When physicists declare that the cosmos once had ten or more dimensions, all but four of which collapsed back where they came from, the virtual state is where they went.
This is so difficult to conceptualize that a simple a.n.a.logy might help: let"s say that you are thinking in words and then shift to humming a tune in your head. This shift to music brings in completely different laws of nature than the laws that govern words. Yet you can move from one dimension to the other quite easily. The musical dimension is always there, even though you may not be contacting it. In the same way, other dimensions exist outside the cosmos, but we do not access their laws, and if we tried, we would have to give up our own. This is why your body and mind could not survive pa.s.sage through a black hole or travel beyond the speed of light.
In order for a packet of energy to appear, to be seen by the eyes as photons, it doesn"t suddenly jump into material existence. Between the void and visible light, between darkness and things you can see and touch, there is the quantum layer. This level is accessible to our brains, which are quantum machines that create thought by manipulating energy into intricate patterns. At this level light dawns as awareness of something, rather than simply being awareness in its pure state. This is the place where Einstein looked for G.o.d"s mind-he was searching for religious insight without the unscientific subjectivity that would have doomed his theories to rejection by his peers. (It is fascinating to follow the mystical journeys of great physicists like Einstein, Schrodinger, and Pauli, because as they arrived, awestruck before the mystery of creation, they had to cover their trails, so to speak, to avoid any accusation that they were mere mystics and not scientists. In the case of Einstein and Pauli, the taint of being too receptive to religious concepts finally did cast a shadow over their later work.) To an experimental physicist, a photon is a quantum of light. This might only be of technical interest were it not for the fact that quantum physics holds the key to even greater secrets. We know nothing directly about energy in its virtual state-this is essentially inaccessible to any measuring instrument. But one way to understand the virtual domain is as the s.p.a.ce between subatomic particles, called the virtual field. A subatomic particle isn"t a thing hanging out in s.p.a.ce like a baseball drifting over home plate, but a disturbance in the field. The disturbance takes place as a quantum event, sometimes pictured as a wave. There is a spiritual parallel to this in the Vedas, where the sages declare that the undisturbed state of consciousness is bliss, the disturbed state is the world.
Throughout the universe, the photon is the most basic unit of electromagnetic energy. Every single thing you can perceive is actually a swirling cloud of energy. At the moment of the Big Bang the universe exploded with energy that now forms everything in existence, and buried somewhere under the skin of every object or event, the primordial light still burns. Being the essence of transformation, primordial light isn"t always the same shape or form billions of years later. A granite cliff is solid, hard, flintlike light; an impulse of love is sweet, emotional light; the firing of a neuron is an instant flash of invisible light. Yet as dissimilar as they appear, when broken down to their most basic components, all things derive from the same primal stuff.
Without the quantum level of reality there could be no cosmos, and it is here that order and symmetry, the keys to life, first appeared. But few eminent physicists besides Einstein have ventured to explore the possibility that the quantum level is a transition to G.o.d. So it is necessary to consider other thinkers. In the last century in India there was a revered saint, Sri Ramakrishna, who held the post of priest in a large, wealthy temple outside Calcutta. It was his duty to place offerings every day before the statue of Kali, one of the guises of the divine mother, the G.o.ddess.
Having done this day after day, Ramakrishna became very devoted to the divine mother. Then one day a change occurred: "It was suddenly revealed to me," he says, "that not just the statue but everything in the room was made of pure spirit. The bowl, the utensils, the floor and ceiling were all manifestations of the same thing. When I realized this, I began to act like someone insane. I began throwing flowers everywhere and worshiping everything. Worship, worship, worship in all directions."
This is what I would call an overlap of levels. Ramakrishna didn"t go into a trance or leave his senses behind-the material level of the world was still visible, but something finer suddenly penetrated and permeated it.
This permeation came from the virtual level, which can"t be registered by the five senses. There is nothing to see, hear, touch, taste, or smell.
However, our brains are designed to a.s.sign a time and place to everything; therefore the invisible levels get merged into the visible, as if the flower or the statue or the holy water has become infused with spirit before our eyes.
An awakening can be very confusing if the brain suddenly has to make sense of impulses not of this world. New feelings arise. Perhaps the most uncanny feeling is that of pure awareness: one is awake, alive, but without thoughts, and free from the limitations of the body. The closest most of us come to this feeling is the first minute when we wake up in the morning or the last before we fall asleep. There is awareness here, but no content, no rush of thoughts in the brain, and if you pay close enough attention, even the sense of ident.i.ty is blanked out-you feel yourself being present, yet you aren"t aware of any specifics such as your name, address, occupation, age, daily concerns, or relationships. At the instant you wake up, just before all the particulars of your situation flood back once more, you could be a child again and your familiar home could be anyplace in the world.
One would a.s.sume that this is just a pa.s.sing feeling. Yet the experience of pure awareness lies at the heart of religious awakening. The only region of nature that enjoys total freedom is heaven, as religious people might call it. In physics the equivalent would be the virtual level of reality. Not that this is a blessed place where souls enjoy the company of angels-such a concept is totally foreign to physical science, but the resemblance is based on a shift in the rules or laws of nature.
Heaven is imagined as a place free from the bonds of earthly life where gravity no longer holds down the body. In heaven there are no cares or attachments. Eternal joy is the soul"s constant state. Without having to imagine them, all these qualities can be traced back to the experience of waking up. The great difference between this experience and heaven is that the virtual domain isn"t outside us; one doesn"t "go" there either in body or soul. One may look forward to dying and achieving heaven as a reward, but it is more in tune with virtual reality to find it now. How? A famous anecdote in India tells of the ascetic who goes to the mountaintop to become enlightened. He fasts and prays constantly; he gives up all worldly desires in favor of meditation.
His renunciation goes on for many years until the day when he realizes he has finally arrived. No matter where he looks, he senses only the unbounded bliss of pure awareness, without attachment of any kind.
Overjoyed, he rushes down into the village below to tell everyone, and as he is going along, he runs into a crowd of drunken revelers. Quietly he tries to thread his way through, but one drunk after another b.u.mps him and makes a crude remark. Finally the ascetic can"t stand it and cries, "Get out of my way!" At that instant he stops, turns around, and goes back to the mountain.
This anecdote is about how easily we are fooled into thinking that we can escape our own anger and frailty, but the larger point is that using the personality to get to the absolute is a contradiction.
Certain parts of ourselves are designed to live in this world of time. It takes resolve and purpose to succeed in loosening our bonds enough so that pure awareness feels totally comfortable, and in the face of conflicts we instinctively fall back on anger, as we fall back on stubbornness, self-centeredness, righteous certainty, and so forth. Yet at another level we do not even possess these qualities, much less feel tied to them.
Religious seeking, whatever form it takes, tries to regain that unattached level.
Seen in this context, some of the most mysterious writings of saints and sages become very clear. Consider this Chinese poem from Li Po, written in the eighth century: You ask why I seclude myself here in my little forest hut?
I just smile and say nothing, listening to the quiet in my soul.
This peacefulness lives in another world That no one owns.
What we can now see in these words is a change of perspective that is always here, right with us, as a possibility. With the loss of time comes a complete absence of ordinary ident.i.ty. The personality that I feel myself to be dissolves beyond the material level, and with that, I lose the need for the landmarks that I have gathered since birth.
Awakening is at the root of the world"s religions. It unites prophets, messiahs, and saints into a privileged elite. That awakening can be recounted through wondrous stories such as that of the young prince Siddhartha, before he became the Buddha, being transported from his palace on a flying white horse supported by angels at each hoof. Such legends convey the tremendous effect of waking up to a new level of reality. That this reality arose in the mind sounds too abstract and prosaic. There needs to be a more dramatic event, such as a heaven that suddenly opens up, or divine messengers who descend from on high.
Most people outside the faith of Islam are unaware of the moment when the prophet Muhammad was awakened. (2) It took place at night in a cave outside the city of Mecca. Muhammad was forty, a merchant of no memorable distinction; in fact almost nothing is known of his life beforehand. On this night, however, the angel Gabriel appeared in a blaze of light and said, "Recite!"
Amazed and baffled, Muhammad could only ask, "Recite what?" To which the angel replied, "Recite in the name of the Lord the creator" and then delivered the gift of prophecy that enabled Muhammad to know the word of G.o.d. This event occurred in the year 610 and is revered in Islam as the Night of Qadr (which means glory or power). But the actual text of the Koran was not a.s.sembled until more than thirty years later, after the Prophet"s death. Since Muhammad could neither read nor write, his account of events is not recorded. All the suras, or chapters, of the Koran, which vary widely in length from three lines to thirty pages, were gathered by a committee that interviewed those remaining devotees who had heard Muhammad speak, as well as from sc.r.a.ps of written text from the same sources.
It is a specific tradition that insists that the angel Gabriel arrived as a physical presence, just as tradition insists that Jesus confronted Satan in the wilderness or that the future Buddha flew from his palace.
(Muhammad would also be accorded a flight on a magical horse, when he was granted a tour of all the levels of heaven. Although one can visit the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and view the place where the journey began, including the hoofprint left in stone by the horse"s heavenward leap, this legend was born from a single line in the Koran that speaks of the Prophet going from his home in Mecca to a far temple.) These legends are now articles of faith, and for anyone to speculate that Muhammad might not have seen an angel or that Satan did not literally offer Jesus kingship over the earth would be risking blasphemy. However, it isn"t necessary to believe or disbelieve the literal version of the Night of Qadr or the forty days in the wilderness. The essential point is that our minds can open to the sudden inrush of light.
THE MIND FIELD.
"Light" as used in scriptures always stands for awareness, whether or not physical light is actually seen. Christians regard Jesus as "the light of the world" because of his state of higher consciousness, and the word "light" is a synonym for a whole range of things, from inspiration and holiness to embodied spirit and G.o.d"s essence. Versions of the same imagery are applied by followers of Buddha and Muhammad, of course, even though each religion makes claims of uniqueness for its founder. The disputes among religions are almost always over exclusive claims that only their founder entered the light, or that his place before G.o.d is highest.
Awareness, though, is a common heritage, even a cosmic heritage if we accept the existence of mind at the quantum and virtual level. When asked what the experience of G.o.d feels like, people"s responses, different as they may be, all converge on a shift into higher awareness.
I am proposing that no one is alive who hasn"t taken just such a journey.
The "way," whether it is used in the Christian sense of a path or the Taoist sense of the hidden stream of life, means following the light. None of us could even be here without having roots where light is born, in the quantum domain. To understand this fully, however, we have to modify our picture of the world from a reality sandwich with three layers into something more dynamic-a flow chart.
Material ----- QUANTUM ----- Virtual Reality is constantly flowing from the virtual level to the quantum to the material. In mystical terms, this constant movement is called "the river of life," because to the mystic everything begins in the mind of G.o.d before it appears on the surface as an event or object. But the river is more than a metaphor. With every thought, memory, and desire we take a journey upriver, from our invisible source to our material destination.
One day I was sitting quietly, preparing for meditation, when I happened to see an old, faintly familiar face in my mind"s eye. After a moment I realized who it was, a patient from twenty years ago. He was a diabetic, and every week I would call him at home to adjust his insulin levels.
As I closed my eyes, I had the faint thought, "I wonder what his name was?" No more than that, just a faint thought. I meditated for an hour, and as I opened my eyes again, a name suddenly came to mind, along with a telephone number. It seemed so improbable that I had recalled them that I went directly to the phone and dialed. The voice at the other end was in fact my old patient Raoul.
Raoul"s telephone number hadn"t changed in all that time, yet my brain had certainly been changing. Therein lies a mystery. Brain cells are not constant. We are born with about half the complement of neurons found in an adult brain; the rest develop between six months and two years of age.
Each neuron is connected to every other through billions of threads that branch out into thousands of tendrils per cell, forming a vast network.
These tendrils, known as dendrites, sprout at the end of the cell like a tree trunk sprouting branches (the word dendrite comes from the Greek word for tree).
Although it sounds fixed and stable, this network is constantly shifting.
And even if a neuron could remain the same, growing no new branches, the signals streaming down the dendrites are never the same from moment to moment. Electrical impulses surge everywhere, shifting as we think new thoughts; our brains are like a telephone system with a thousand calls taking place every second. The main difference is that the cable lines of our nervous system are unstable, constantly changing their molecules with every moment of experience-both inner and outer. The wires are notoriously nonstationary, since they are made not of copper but of fluid fats, water, electrolytes, and the electrical charges running through them. Having a single thought is more complex than sorting out one message from all the telephone calls in the world. While we are managing that feat electrically, the brain also surges with chemical messages. One dendrite isn"t strung into another; there is always a tiny gap between them. Across this gap, known as a synapse, each message must find a way to cross; otherwise the neurons would be isolated and unable to communicate.
Electricity doesn"t jump across the gap-the voltages are much too tiny to accomplish this. Instead, certain chemicals are emitted on one side of the synapse and received on the other. These chemicals, called neurotransmitters, include dopamine and serotonin.
Amid these chaotic swirls of chemicals and electrons, no one has ever found a memory. Memories are fixed. For me to recall Raoul"s face, I have to retrieve it intact, not in bits and pieces. Where do I go to do that?
Certainly not into the firestorm of the brain. No single neuron in my brain has survived intact for twenty years. Like migrating birds, molecules of fat, protein, and sugar have drifted through my neurons, adding to them and leaving again after a time.
Even though we can identify the memory centers of the brain, no one has ever proved that memory is stored there. We a.s.sume it is, but how? To store a memory in a neuron is like storing a memory in water. (In fact, the brain is so fluid that if h.o.m.ogenized it would have the same water content as a bowl of oatmeal. Your blood is actually more filled with solid content than your cerebrum.) The notion that we store memory the way a computer stores it, by imprinting microchips with bits of information, is not supported by the evidence; when neurologists try to prove it, they soon hit a wall.
It is the same wall that Einstein and the other founders of quantum physics broke through. A neuron is a poor receptacle for memory because, at bottom, its molecules are not solid; they are patterns of invisible energy grouped into the appearance of particles. These energy packets themselves survive only on the quantum level; go deeper still, into the virtual level, and the patterns dissolve; the energy vanishes into ghostly vibrations and then into nothing. Can memory be stored in nothing?
The answer is yes. When I remembered my old patient"s face, I took a journey into nothing, searching for him nowhere. I used my brain to make this journey, or at least to begin it. But it wasn"t my brain that recalled his telephone number, any more than my radio contains the music I hear in my car.
I mentioned already that the virtual domain has no time, s.p.a.ce, or energy.